PROXIMATE

A corporate recovery job turns into a tightly wound descent through a failed deep-sea research facility, where every room feels hostile even when nothing moves. PROXIMATE frames its horror through bureaucratic absurdity: your employer cares about reclaiming intellectual property, your manager offers reassuring calls, and the official tools insist that alarming evidence is perfectly ordinary. Beneath that dry satire sits a bleak science-fiction premise involving a Melbourne startup, AI-controlled corpses, and a workforce built from the recently dead. The result is tense, intimate, and deliberately suspicious of every comforting explanation it provides.

Investigation drives the experience rather than combat. Wearing the SONA image-recognition visor, you navigate the flooded-feeling corridors through sparse text labels, proximity readouts, and sound cues, gradually assembling a mental picture of spaces the technology refuses to clearly show. Chat logs left by the research staff provide the narrative trail, while the visor’s unreliable interpretations force you to question whether you are misunderstanding the facility or being actively misled. A roughly 90-minute time limit gives the story a compact, pressure-cooker structure, and the absence of conventional weapons makes awareness, listening, and choosing when not to look far more important than fighting.

Its strongest idea is making accessibility-style information itself feel ominous: a tool intended to clarify the world instead becomes another possible source of danger. The game uses minimal visual certainty and carefully placed audio to create dread without leaning on endless chase scenes or inventory busywork, while its workplace language adds a sharp, darkly funny edge to the horror. Queer characters and their communications are treated as part of the human cost behind the project, not merely background flavor. Fans of short narrative horror such as Stories Untold, Observation, or SOMA’s corporate sci-fi unease should find plenty to like, especially if they prefer unsettling implication and atmosphere over action-heavy scares.